KUMUD JENAMANI
Jamshedpur, Aug 16: In a major breakthrough in incidents of fraudulent cash withdrawal from ATMs, Jamshedpur police busted an inter-state criminals gang by arresting three persons on Tuesday.
Beside arresting the three, the police have recovered as many as 70 ATM cards, Rs 9,500 cash, a car and articles bought from the siphoned off money.
Two of those arrested were identified as Sudhakar Kumar (26) and Pawan Kumar (38) both residents of Kalibari thana and Paraya thana respectively in the Gaya district.
The identity of the third arrested person has been withheld as the police team is continuing the raids keeping him along.
Revealing the breakthrough, senior SP, Prabhat Kumar said that on July 27, three complaints of fraudulent withdrawal were received from Bistupur, Jugsalai and Azadnagar thana areas involving a total amount of over Rs 3 lakhs.
“Having received three FIRs about fraudulent withdrawal on a single day, we set up a team of police officials to detect the cases. City SP, K Vijay Shankar who led the team succeeded to solve the cases by arresting three members of an inter-state criminal gang which was active in the steel city during the end of July, ” Kumar said while addressing a press conference here today.
The senior SP said the gang members used to follow different modus operandi in making the victims to fall prey to the crime.
“These criminals used to change the ATM card on the pretext of helping out elderly persons and later would withdraw cash from the victim’s account. They would also make the fraudulent withdrawal after transferring and manipulating the victims’ account numbers, ” the senior SP pointed out.
The senior police officer, however, could not say exactly which modus operandi the gang members had followed in the fraudulent withdrawal committed in Bistupur, Jugsalai and Azadnagar on July 27.
According to Kumar, the probing team is yet to find out how many others are involved in the fraudulent withdrawal racket but it has succeeded to establish that the gang has siphoned off lakhs of rupees in various districts, including Deoghar and Seraikela-Kharsawan in Jharkhand.